This article examines the political orientations of The Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu and The Telegraph in the run up to the Indian elections held from 7 April to 12 May 2014. The window of examination is between 10 February and 15 March when all political news items related to the national partiesthe Congress, the BJP and the AAP-were analyzed to determine which paper endorsed which party and to what extent. The findings show that in the run up to the polling days, the BJP occupied the most political space across the four papers. It also scored the highest in terms of positivity. The Hindu and The Telegraph were found to be more supportive of the Congress. A time-series analysis shows that political orientation among the papers shifted throughout the period of analysis as India geared up for the longest elections in its history.
A strong-positive correlation was found to exist between the overall press bias and election results. Furthermore, readership was found to have a moderating effect on the positive relationship between bias and votes. While the four newspapers had varying amounts of influence on the voting preference of the masses, their political leniencies were found to be inter-correlated. Finally, a model is built to predict the probable vote share by analysing political bias in the popular press -with an accuracy of 90.2%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.